How long should a teen convicted of a south Bethlehem murder spend in prison?

The family of 25-year-old murder victim Joseph Rodriguez told Northampton County Judge Craig Dally on Tuesday of their grief in the year since he was gunned down in south Bethlehem.

Rodriguez's sister recalled how she fell asleep holding his hand in the hospital, hours before he was wheeled away for doctors to harvest his organs.

Days later, his then 10-year-old son was crying as he lay next the casket, refusing to let go of it.

And to this day, his mother sends "bear hugs to heaven" and tells her 82-year-old grandmother that Rodriguez isn't around because he moved out of state.

It's a life sentence, his sister Genieva Rodriguez testified, from which her family will never be paroled.

"Show him the same mercy as he showed Joseph and my family that day," she said, referring to the sentencing of her brother's killer.

Rodriguez, who along with many of the two dozen other family members who crowded into Dally's courtroom wore a white T-shirt bearing the victim's photograph, made their case for convicted murderer Lucas Cabassa to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Cabassa was just 17 on June 1, 2013, when he gunned down Joseph Rodriguez during a fight in south Bethlehem. He is the first juvenile to be tried and convicted of first-degree murder in Northampton County since a pair of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that declared the death penalty and mandatory life in prison without parole are cruel and unusual punishment for youthful offenders.

Now, Dally must choose between life in prison without parole or life in prison with the possibility of parole after 35 years. That would make Cabassa 53 if he becomes eligible to be released from prison.

In making her case, Assistant District Attorney Kelly Lewis Fallenstein submitted several victim impact statements and had four of them read to the judge.

The family members acknowledged Rodriguez made mistakes in his life and served time in prison, but said he still had a big heart and tried to make things right when he was released. He visited and financially supported his now 11-year-old son, Julian, and was a father figure to his girlfriend's two children from a prior relationship. Rodriguez had only two months with his second son, Elias, before he was killed.

"The only picture I have of my son with his father was when he was a month old," said Christina Dingmen, who showed Dally the picture.

Cabassa, sitting alongside his attorneys in an orange jumpsuit, listened to the testimony.

A jury in April convicted Cabassa of first-degree murder. Prosecutors said Cabassa fired a .22-caliber revolver at Rodriguez as he and as many as seven others fought with Cabassa's friends in the Lynfield Homes development.

The jury rejected the argument of Cabassa's attorney that his client was defending himself and his friends when they were attacked by a rival group that outnumbered them by a ratio of 2-to-1.

At the trial, defense attorney Steven Mills recounted Cabassa's testimony that he feared for his life as he and his teenage friends faced down the group of grown men.

Seeking revenge for an earlier attack on a neighborhood boy, Rodriguez, the leader of the group, landed punches on Cabassa's friend, 6-foot-6 Jonathan Martinez, who struggled to fight back, witnesses testified. Meanwhile, another of Cabassa's friends was being kicked on the ground by three men, according to testimony.

As two more men came after Cabassa, who said he was backed against a wall, prosecutors say he pulled a small silver revolver from his pocket and fired a single shot at Rodriguez, fatally wounding him.

Fallenstein on Tuesday introduced Sheriff Deputy George Volpe, an expert in gang identification. Volpe testified that that the tattoos on Cabassa's arm are consistent with the Bloods gang and traced the particular sect to the West Coast.

He said jailhouse letters from and to Cabassa are littered with gang slang that Bloods members teach their members and knowledge of the gang infrastructure.

One of those letters was from Qu'eed Batts who, at 14 years old, was convicted of a 2006 Easton homicide. Batts was resentenced to life in prison after the Supreme Court ruled the mandatory sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional.

Cabassa's defense attorneys are expected to call an expert Nov. 10 to testify as to mitigating circumstances in their case to get a lesser sentence.